What An Intelligent, Compassionate and Authentic Christian Faith Looks Like

by Roland Ashby

Review:This is actually a book collecting together a number of interviews that were done by the author for the Australian newspaper The Melbourne Anglican over a number of years with 25 well known, and lesser known but well considered Christians. So we have folks like Rowan Williams, Keith Ward, Shane Claibourne, Brian McLaren and Michael Luenig amongst others offering short insights on a number and range of subjects. None of the interviews are particularly long and so in this respect I can see that they might make good starting points for group discussions. However to be fair it is also this brevity that left me feeling a slight lack with the book because I felt that as a general read the articles were just too short for me to really feel satisfied - though a short interview is fine in a magazine or newspaper because usually it's covering a topical subject in the forefront of the mind or a lead in for the speakers newest book etc.. As a collection on it's own they just left me with a feeling of a slight lack of substance.
On the design front, it's nicely set out and I like the fact that there was a photograph of every contributor and short summary biography too.

I would recommend this book to someone that just wanted to get a quick feel for the sort of people known in the Christian world and for the sort of ideas you can encounter there, and indeed as I've said before I can see this might be a really good book for using in schools or groups.